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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Do you remember camp as a kid? It should evoke memories of sports and exploring woods. Even day camps in the city have games and excursions to fun places.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees has a Youth Camp too. But "fun" might mean some thing else in the deranged world of the union bosses who support dictators like Fidel Castro and terrorists like Hamas.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

In December, Krugman and five other liberal economic thinkers (Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder, and Larry Mishel) were invited to the Oval Office for a 90-minute off-the-record audience with the president. It was a month after the midterms, and many progressives were worried that even the modified liberalism of the administration’s first two years would dissolve in a new spirit of conciliation with the ascendant right. The economists present understood the meeting, one of them says, as the moment when Obama “talked to the left."

The economists sat ringing Obama�two Nobelists, a former Labor secretary, and a former vice-chairman of the Fed. Not a Gentile among them, Krugman noticed, but �an amazingly high proportion of beards.� To begin the meeting, Obama asked each of his guests to identify the most pressing economic issue. Five of the economists emphasized the same problem. Unemployment, they said, was so high that the recovery might never get out of first gear. It was not the time for austerity; the president should focus on short-term job creation and turn to the deficit later. But the other economist, Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, held out. Concentrate on the long-term outlook, he told the president.

For Krugman, the path forward was perfectly clear: The only way to avert a deepening crisis was massive Keynesian stimulus. During the nineties in Japan, he had seen the nightmare alternative. Officials in Tokyo, faced with a very similar scenario, had done too little to stimulate the economy, again and again, and as their nation’s recovery stumbled, they found they were toggling an unplugged joystick. And yet now, after more than two years of economic calamity at home, the liberal solution again wasn’t getting through: Krugman couldn’t even build a consensus among six like-minded economists, let alone convince a Democratic president. �I have no idea what Jeff was talking about,� he says.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Tuesday afternoon, The City of Toronto's Executive Committee held a hearing about whether to accept the City Manager's report that decided the term "Israeli Apartheid" in Toronto's Pride Festival does not violate the City's anti-discrimination policy. As one councillor pointed out, this is an issue that really has relatively little effect on the City and yet takes up an inordinate amount of Council business.

In the same session, prior to that, the transfer of stewardship of Casa Loma and the sale of 22 public housing properties were discussed and voted upon. Both matters, which will have a lasting effect on the City, took up far less time than the Pride discussion.

Nonetheless, the Pride issue does reflect on the City and people have a right to be interested in whatever they choose. I was one of the deputants arguing that the Executive Committee should reject the Manager's report. To be fair, I think the City manager got it right and the term itself is not, by definition, "hate speech."

But as Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti observed, the intent of what is said is sometimes much more discriminatory and nefarious than the words themselves. My position was that whether or not the City's anti-discrimination policy was violated, Council as democratically elected representatives had the right to reject the finding. They are not Supreme Court judges ruling on the validity of legislation or the wording of law, they are the people's representatives whose job is to represent constituents and not a policy. Pride has the right to include any messaging they choose, but the city is not obliged to validate them with tax subsidies, and in the case of groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the City has a right to distance itself from them by witholding funds for any event that includes such bigotry.

There is a difference between free speech and subsidized speech which a number of people fail to recognize.

The term Israeli Apartheid is used for the sole purpose about lying about the nature of Israel and to attempt to deligitimize the country, along with attempting to boycott and sanction it.

Apartheid is a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement that does not exist in Israel. Let's put it simply: a Palestinian Arab could convert to becoming an Israeli Jew. In the Apartheid era, could a black South African convert to being a white Afrikaner and get all the commensurate rights? There's your answer about whether Israel is an "apartheid" state.

The sole purpose of calling Israel an apartheid country is to fight a battle that was lost by the Arabs over and over again militarily. This is illustrated by the likes of Khaled Muammar, the head of the terrorist-supporting Canadian Arab Federation, who complained that he was a refugee from a country he never lived in. The Arabs failed to wipe out Israel with force of arms, and now they want to do it with propaganda, and have enlisted Marxist dupes like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, whose antiquated, vacuous, cult-like belief in the politics of oppression and victimology is rife for exploitation by the smarter, more manipulative forces of Islamism and anti-Semitism.

In the end, little was accomplished. Council's Executive Committee was, in the vast majority sympathetic to those who opposed public funding for a venue that facilitates the bigotry of the anti-Israel group, but it was clear a deal had been struck between Councillors before the meeting had begun. The report was accepted, but al-QuAIA won't march, because they know Pride will have its funding pulled permanently if they did.

An interesting afternoon nonetheless.

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Here's me racing through my presentation. The reason I'm speaking so fast is that the presentation time was cut for speakers to 4 minutes from 5. So I had to do some fast editing and faster talking.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Tennessee has a proposed Bill that would make it illegal to talk about homosexuality or say "Gay" in that context in the classroom

So the original and greatest Mr. Sulu, George Takei, is lending his name to the cause to fight this silly bias. Instead of saying "Gay" in Tennessee, they can substitute it by saying "Takei" as in, "I support Takei marriage" or "I'm going to City Hall on Tuesday to oppose funding for the Takei Pride Festival if they allow participation by the odious Queers Against Israeli Apartheid"

I met George Takei at a Star Trek convention when I was a geeky 14 year old (yes, the only thing that's changed is that I'm not 14 any more). He was incredibly nice, friendly and took a lot of time to talk and make this awkward (then) kid feel appreciated, so I remain a big fan and as far as I'm concerned, it not only OK, it's great to be Takei!

And there's a whole line of "It's OK to be Takei" products that you can buy from George's website. I guess the rhyming is good, but I think I like the sound of "Sulu pride" better.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

STANDPOINT magazine has a fascinating online article by David Barrett about the argument in England over one of its most talented writers, Martin Amis. You can read it all through this link. Some excerpts below:

"Writers die twice," wrote Martin Amis, "once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies." In the case of Philip Larkin, it was decided that two deaths weren't enough. The dead bores attacked the poems as dead bores do: by trashing the dead man's reputation. When he went to the grave in 1985, Larkin was known by many people to be a great poet. Eight years later — after the publication of the first Collected Poems, the Selected Letters and the Life — Larkin was known by many more people to be a racist, a womaniser, a porn collector and a drunk. It was soon questioned whether Larkin wrote great poetry. Then it seemed irrelevant that he wrote poetry at all.

A few serious writers stood up for Larkin with sensible words. Martin Amis was one of those writers. Clive James was another. They said what mattered, and what still matters: that Larkin had talent, and that the man's private failures were a private affair, because the man chose to keep them that way. Amis was still defending Larkin in October. On Letters to Monica he wrote that "Larkin's life was a failure; his work was a triumph. That is all that matters. Because the work, unlike the life, lives on." In September, Faber will publish the Selected Poems of Philip Larkin. The poems are chosen by Martin Amis.

-- -- --

Many people who write about literature think that Martin Amis's talent is dead. That talent, apparently, fell terminally ill about the same time as Larkin's funeral: in the mid 1980s, after the publication of Money. One reviewer, writing in The Sunday Times in 2003, offered a neat summary of this popular opinion in the press. London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995) "threw into embarrassing relief the meagreness of his fictional repertoire". Einstein's Monsters (1987) and Heavy Water (1998) "showed that even the short story format couldn't curb his tendency to meander and repeat". "Two experimental novellas", Time's Arrow (1991) and Night Train (1997), "both proved ill-judged". In Koba the Dread (2002) Amis sounded "even more egotistical than he did in his autobiography, Experience [2000]". Yellow Dog (2003) "ends with a baby getting triumphantly up on to its feet. But the impression it leaves is of a talent on its last legs."

..True literary style is unique. It's a voice heard above the immense hum of printed words. For Nabokov, style was matter. For Amis, style is perception: "It's not the flashy twist, the abrupt climax, or the seamless sequence of events that characterises a writer and makes him unique. It's a tone, it's a way of looking at things." A unique voice on the page provokes a unique response. No two readers can react to a real prose style in the same way. Yet many literary journalists try to persuade us that that's exactly what happens when they read a new Martin Amis novel. The style they use to describe his work is almost always the same. There are, of course, occasional warm reviews. The Pregnant Widow, rereleased in March in a Vintage paperback edition, was briefly praised in the Guardian and The Independent recently. But it is true to say that there's a consensus on Amis's work that is wholly unrelated to the quality of his words. The tale of Amis's dead talent is so popular in the press nowadays that it's a cliché. The cliché is betrayed by the dead boring style adopted by many writers when they write about Amis.

Even worse is the consensus on Amis as a person. He's Keith Talent. He's a very bad guy. In Larkin's case, the vicious ad hominem attacks began after he died. In Amis's case, personal abuse already passes for legitimate literary criticism. Critics have accused Amis of racism, misogyny and egotism. He's vain (the teeth), and greedy (the £500,000 advance, the Manchester University salary). He's "ageist", a shameless self-promoter and "past HIS sell-by date" (the euthanasia drama). He sprouts "arrogant twaddle" (the children's writing melee). Professor Terry Eagleton famously shot a rocket at the House of Amis: "[Kingsley Amis was] a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals." Eagleton added that: "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."

One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word "intellectual" seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife."

Auden wasn't alone in thinking that intellectuals suffer from ethical deficiencies. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson once devoted an entire book, Intellectuals: from Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (2000), to proving that some of the 20th century's most prominent thinkers were moral cretins.

Read the rest of this amusing and interesting column by John Naughton in The Guardian

Nusseibeh's proposal that Palestinians should temporarily abandon the idea of an independent state and focus on improving the quality of their life coincides precisely with the policies of Benjamin Netenyahu. Unfortunately, that proposition is not realistic. Palestinians must have a state where they have political rights and as soon as they convincingly abandon violence and unequivocally recognize Israel, they should get one.

Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University, in Jerusalem, and a scion of an eminent Palestinian Muslim family, has long championed a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Here, he probes how the Israelis and the Palestinians can reach that goal. His optimal solution would be two states, but he fears that may no longer be feasible. A single state granting citizenship to all living in Israel and in those Palestinian territories that Israel conquered in 1967 seems equally unlikely. So Nusseibeh advances the idea of a single state run by the Israelis that offers the Palestinians civil and human rights but no political rights. "Simply put," he writes, "in this scenario the Jews could run the country while the Arabs could at last enjoy living in it." This striking proposal grows out of Nusseibeh's political philosophy. He recognizes the fears and hopes of the Israelis as well as the Palestinians, stresses the morality and practicality of nonviolence, and views the state not as an end in itself but as a means to the good life. This idea of a "second-class citizenship" for Palestinians, he adds, could perhaps be just an "interim step." One can appreciate Nusseibeh's laudable effort to get beyond a seemingly endless occupation and fruitless negotiations, but his stark proposal is a nonstarter. Perhaps, however, this proposal and the other painstakingly reasoned arguments in this book will provoke the parties to reconsider that ideal but elusive two-state solution.

Obama is now marketing coffee mugs with his picture and the caption "Made in the USA" on one side and his long form birth certificate on the other. A $15 donation to Obama for America (the 2012 campaign) gets you one.

UPDATE: You can see the press conference at THIS LINK. The craziness starts at about 35:00 (the last few minutes). I feel sorry for poor Kristen Dunst, who looks horrendously embarrassed being beside this idiot.

CANNES, France - Lars von Trier brought the end of the world to the Cannes Film Festival — then the Danish director really shook things up, saying he sympathizes with Adolf Hitler, thinks Israel is a pain and plans to make a porn flick with Kirsten Dunst.

Von Trier's remarks Wednesday stirred up reporters and sparked a swift response from festival organizers, who issued a statement saying they were "disturbed" and had called the Danish director in to explain himself.

Von Trier's publicists later released a separate statement saying the director "sincerely apologize(d)" for the comments.

"I am not anti-Semitic or racially prejudiced in any way, nor am I a Nazi," he is quoted as saying.

Von Trier made the incendiary comments at a news conference following the first screening of his latest film, apocalypse drama "Melancholia," where he was flanked by its stars, including Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Asked about his German heritage, von Trier launched into a rambling train of thoughts, starting with how he used to think he was a Jew and his disappointment when he learned he was not.

"I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, because, you know, my family was German," von Trier said. "Which also gave me some pleasure. ... "What can I say? I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. But I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end," von Trier said. "He's not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I'm not for the Second World War, and I'm not against Jews.

"I am very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass."

Von Trier then asked, "How can I get out of this sentence?"

Going on to say he liked Hitler aide Albert Speer, von Trier finally wrapped up with the wisecrack, "OK, I'm a Nazi."

Afterward, von Trier told The Associated Press the remarks just spilled out without any forethought.

"I don't have so much to say, so I kind of have to improvise a little and just to let the feelings I have kind of come out into words," von Trier said. "This whole Nazi thing, I don't know where it came from, but you spend a lot of time in Germany, you sometimes want to feel a little free and just talk about this (expletive), you know?"

Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, which is based in Paris, said the comments were an example of the growing phenomenon of what he called "respectable anti-Semitism."

"Von Trier's remarks serve as another reminder of the seeming comfort that anti-Semites feel expressing their prejudices in public gatherings," Kantor said in a statement. "There must be consequences for these types of racist tirades, or it will just continue and escalate."

Dunst, Gainsbourg and other "Melancholia" co-stars, including John Hurt and Stellan Skarsgard, sat stiff and stony-faced through most of von Trier's comments. At one point, though, Dunst leaned over and whispered to von Trier, "Oh my God, this is terrible."

Monday, May 16, 2011

"The alleged victim in the case claims she entered his prestigious $3,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Sofitel hotel, believing it was empty. Instead, she claims Strauss-Kahn emerged from a bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway and dragged her into a bedroom where he allegedly assaulted her, said CNN's Jim Bitterman. "

Personally, I'm expecting Dominique Strauss-Kahn's defense to be, "It was an honest mistake. I thought she was the hooker in a maid outfit that I ordered!"

Strauss-Kahn now faces additional allegations that he sexually assaulted a French journalist during an interview.

So far, there are no reports that Strauss-Kahn is alleging that he mistook his hotel room for a "community clinic."

Sunday, May 15, 2011

An insightful column from the always astute Angello Persichilli in the Toronto Star discusses how Stephen Harper and Dalton McGuinty have changed the way Parliament can deal with Quebec's parochial politics.

SAN DIEGO -- A terrorist organization whose home base is in the Middle East has established another home base across the border in Mexico.

..Hezbolah has operated in South America for decades and then Central America, along with their sometime rival, sometime ally Hamas.

Now, the group is blending into Shi'a Muslim communities in Mexico, including Tijuana. Other pockets along the U.S.-Mexico border region remain largely unidentified as U.S. intelligence agencies are focused on the drug trade.

"They have had clandestine training in how to live in foreign hostile territories," the agent said.

The agent, who has spent years deep undercover in Mexico, said Hezbollah is partnering with drug organizations, but which ones is not clear at this time.

He told 10News the group receives cartel cash and protection in exchange for Hezbollah expertise.

No! Not that way! He's writing about the Conservative government's proposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and Black makes a lot of sense.

Stephen Harper's position on marijuana laws are archaic, illogical and anti-libertarian. Alcohol does extensive damage to many people, but in a free society, we allow people to make choices rather than have the state do it for them. Marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol and the hypocrisy of criminalizing one and not the other undermines any morality to those laws.

Most police chiefs in North America recognize that enforcing laws against it is not only ineffective but a waste of both scarce police and court resources.

The libertarian movement seeks to legalize and tax marijuana, and Canadians can lobby their government to turn the liability of antiquated nanny-state regulations into a revenue producing asset.

Here's an excerpt of what Black (along with Evan Wood) wrote (full column can be seen at The National Post):

..the argument that locking up more drug dealers improves community safety is flatly untrue. Research clearly demonstrates that gun violence is a common and natural result of many a successful drug bust, and often occurs when remaining gangs fight over the new economic opportunity that police have unwittingly created. California is an excellent example of this sad reality. The state now has a prison budget that exceeds expenditures on post-secondary education, and yet the intractable gang violence that is directly linked to the drug trade has only been inflamed by these efforts.

Clearly, we need new approaches to address the drug problem. Writing recently in the Globe and Mail, former federal Conservative party campaign manager Tom Flanagan noted that “Some prominent Canadian conservatives, such as former Fraser Institute president Michael Walker, Conservative MP Scott Reid, legal writer Karen Selick and financial journalist Terence Corcoran, have led the way in decrying drug prohibition, but their position has to become more appreciated within the conservative movement.”

One can only hope that this happens soon. Failed mandatory minimum sentencing legislation is currently being repealed in various U.S. states, including New York, Michigan, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and it will be a sad legacy for Canadian conservatives if we sit quietly and ignore how U.S. society has been remarkably weakened by the same laws our government is now hell-bent on enacting.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

British intelligence agents last week joined their US counterparts to sift through the material after repeated references to Britain were found in the haul retrieved from bin Laden's compound when US commandos killed him this month.

An AfghanTaliban commander, who has previously provided reliable information to foreign media, disclosed that he had visited bin Laden at the compound in Abbottabad.

He said that the Saudi terror chief also received sporadic visits from leaders of his al-Qaeda network, Taliban allies and fellow Arab fundraisers.

The disclosure will be crucial for Western intelligence chiefs as they try and assess bin Laden's role in international terror operations. They had initially believed that his contact with the outside world was conducted via messages on computer thumb drives.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Britain was one of six countries – along with the US, Canada, Israel, Germany and Spain – identified as a target for terror strikes in the intelligence haul. Officials did not disclose specific plots or threats.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Christopher Hitchens can't speak with his mouth right now due to esophageal cancer, but he still speaks loudly and forcefully with his pen.

His column on the stupidity of Noam Chomsky's moral relativism and misrepresentation appears in the current issue of Slate:

The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

The National Post's Jonathan Kay has a new book out called Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground. It's an intriguing examination of the conspiracy theory movement in the USA, with a particular focus on the 9-11 conspiracy aficionados.

A survey in February recorded that 51% of GOP primary voters believed Mr. Obama to be a non-native son. In a victory for common sense, support for the position plummeted with the recent release of Mr. Obama's long-form birth certificate.

Liberals should avoid crowing too loudly, though, since they have their own share of nutters. In 2007, pollster John Zogby asked Democratic voters about the terrorist attacks of 9/11; 42% of respondents said that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney either allowed the attacks to happen or deliberately caused the attacks to happen, presumably for political gain or to reap a financial windfall by waging a war for oil in the Middle East.

To Jonathan Kay, Birthers and Truthers are flipsides of the same coin. "Like an earthquake, 9/11 produced a great fissure through the heart of America's political center," he writes in "Among the Truthers." "It is not just politics that separates these two camps, but the very manner by which they answer fundamental questions about the world."

Saturday, May 7, 2011

"In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there's a "boom and bust" cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.

Get the full lyrics, story and free download of the song in high quality MP3 and AAC files at:

Saturday morning on May 7, the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) will play host to a teachers' conference aiming to "mobilize teachers to resist neo-liberalism."

A group that calls itself Educators for Peace and Justice is presenting a conference titled "The Sanctuary Schools Forum" which claims, "Our schools, and especially our students and their parents, are increasingly under attack. "

Teachers that attempt to provide a good education aren't being attacked. But the ones that seek to push a biased, politicized viewpoint on young children are upset at being exposed and criticized.

"Neoliberalism describes a market-driven[1] approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that stresses the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the political and economic priorities of the state."

Neoliberalism is most vociferously opposed by socialists and Marxists (and of course, Naomi Klein).

Is it the role of educators to push an anti-Capitalist agenda in the classroom, particularly at the elementary and secondary school level? Do most Canadian parents want their children to be brainwashed against capitalism in school?

Jim Wilson is The Progressive Conservative Critic for Colleges and Universities in Ontario. Let him know what you think.

Friday, May 6, 2011

The NDP has escaped serious scrutiny for a long time, but now as Official Opposition, their sudden exposure to the center spotlight will show Canadians the alarming ineptitude of Canada's socialist party.

Tom Mulcair is one of the NDP's two Deputy Leaders and generally considered to be among the smartest people in his party. That bodes badly for Jack Layton, as within 24 hours of the election, Muclair earned the moniker 'Tin Foil'Tom by publicly expressing the conspiracy theory that the US lied about having photographs of Osama bin Laden dead.

Layton's other Deputy Leader, Libby Davies, should have been expected to be the first senior NDP caucus member to embarrass the party with a conspiracy theory. Davies had already introduced a 9-11 conspiracy theory to Parliament in 2008, accusing the US government of being complicit in the World Trade Center attacks. But this week, she chose another way to embarrass the NDP.

The day after the election, she appeared on CPAC, the parliamentary news channel, and upset that she wasn't given enough talk-time in the panel that included Conservative MP Gord Brown and Liberal MP Mauril Belanger, Davies sarcastically thanked the host, and then to hammer home her rudeness, pointed out explicitly, "I was being sarcastic!" Then, she yanked her earpiece out while shouting "Christ!!"

There are few junior parliamentarians who would publicly behave like a spoiled, petulant child. At least Helena Guergis chose to have her Charlottetown airport meltdown outside the presence of national television cameras. And that incident was the one that numbered her days as a Conservative Cabinet Minister.

Jack Layton has forbidden many of his crop of rookie MP's from saying anything in public, for fear they would reveal their incompetence and inability to perform their new jobs properly. But with the added exposure, Canada is going to learn the hard way that the NDP's buffoonery runs all the way to the top of that organization.

The results of the Mountain Equipment Co-Op Board election were announced last week. Dru Oja Jay, a harsh critic of Israel, who advocated a boycott of Israeli goods, was one of the candidates. He publicly said he wanted to "reopen the debate" about using Israeli products. Of course "reopen the debate" is code for wanting to change a currently established position. Dru's use of that term reflects the same context as those who say they want to "reopen the debate" about abortion in Canada. The people who say that are uniformly doing so to advocate against legal abortion.

Despite the full support of those prominent anti-Israel extremists, Oja Jay went down in flames, coming 8th out of 10 candidates, narrowly missing 9th place by less than a hundred votes.

The outcome is positive, and not only for the obvious reason that Mountain Equipment Co-Op's board won't contain an agent of bias against the middle east's only liberal democracy for the next year. It also demonstrates how little influence the voices of fanaticism have over the general public.

The anti-Israel zealots are weak and they know it, which is why they only choose what they think are the softest targets to attack. They think that a co-op would be naturally sympathetic to them. Though they won't see it, because ideologues seldom see outside their own obsession, this rejection of them is indicative of the bankruptcy of their ideas.

The people have spoken, and we've told the anti-Israel bigots that we aren't interested in their message.

Well, not they are the official opposition and within a day, they've managed to make their own idiocy and incompetence their narrative. The only surprising thing is that it wasn't caused by one of the usual suspect NDP buffoons, but by Thomas Mulcair, who is generally regarded as one of the most shrewd members of his party.

I should amend that to 'was regarded'. Muclair came out yesterday with his imbecilic conspiracy theory that photos of Osama bin Laden being dead don't exist.

The US has already been criticized by angry Muslims for burying the caliph of terrorism, Osama bin laden at sea. Palestinian groups and others are lionizing the dead terrorist as a martyr. The Obama administration is particularly sentient of Muslim sensibilities, so the fear that releasing gory photos of Bin Laden with a gaping bullet wound in his head would inflame the already inflamed Islamic "street" is very understandable.

If I had a "conspiracy theory" it would be that bin Laden's "burial at sea" is really a euphemism for being on display in a vat of formaldehyde in a Langley, Virginia basement. But that's just a joke I'd muse about, not something I'd publicly present as a serious theory, particularly if I were the Deputy Leader of Canada's Official Opposition.

But then, as this blog has often observed, competence is not a strong point for the New Democratic Party. Of course, Canada, as a nation will find that out the hard way over the next 5 years.

The Conservative majority was the right choice for Canada, given the irresponsible opposition parties it faced in the election last Monday. But it isn't healthy for a country to have one party rule absolutely with the only challenge coming from inept radicals.

The Liberal party's collapse was due to a ineffective leader who guided the party's pandering to the radical left and was rejected by the left, right, and centre. The Tories, under Stephen Harper's disciplined leadership, has absorbed the centre that the Liberals abandoned. The next 5 years should be an opportunity for the Liberal Party of Canada to rebuild itself as a responsible party of the centre. If it does, Canada will have a healthy democracy. If it doesn't, we have to hope the Conservative Party governs benignly, because if the Liberal party continues their pandering, re-branding as the "progressive" party, the Tories will be governing with relative impunity for a very long time.

UPDATE: The NDP's teenage MP from Quebec: "“I don’t think separatism is dead,” he said. “The NDP and I respect sovereignty.” Is a renaming of the NDP to Le Bloc Socialiste far off?

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Iran broke off relations with Egypt because of the latter's peace treaty with Israel. But the Islamic Republic, the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, is making new overtures to the post-Mubarak government in Egypt.

The Liberal Party of Canada hadn't processed a lesson the Coca-Cola corporation learned the hard way back in 1985, with the brief reshaping of the brand to New Coke, which bore more similarities to a rival (Pepsi) than its successful historical product. The result was an overwhelming public rejection, and the lesson was: it's generally not a good idea to mess with a winning formula.

The Liberals were the most successful political party in the free world during the 20th century for a simple reason - they played the centre.

It was never a secret that yesterday's Canadian election that resulted in a Conservative majority was a power-grab by Michael Ignatieff's Liberals, who hoped to form a government with the support of the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois. To do that, former (and soon-to-be again) professor Michael Ignatieff, who was generally viewed as being a right leaning Liberal, shifted his party so far to the left that there was little daylight between his platform and that of Jack Layton's socialist NDP.

Stephen Harper's success came from being not a party of the right, but that of the centre-right. He put a lid on the far-right in his party who want to ban abortion, oppose Gay rights and impose a social Conservative agenda. By being a fiscally Conservative party with centrist social policies, Harper was able to capture the middle which has always been the key to electoral success in Canada.

And he captured it from the Liberals, whose former supporters were placated by Harper's responsible leadership as Prime Minister since 2006, and fearful of the radical left (a.k.a. "progressive") shift Ignatieff was steering for the Liberals.

The Liberals lost in 43 ridings where their members were incumbents. They lost 27 of them, about 63 per cent, to the Conservatives. They didn't take a single riding away from the Tories. The only new riding they took was from an NDP incumbent. The NDP's success in raising their seat count to 102 and becoming Official Opposition for the first time shows that when offered the choice between "the real thing" and a copy of a competitor, like Coke drinkers, Canadians prefer the genuine article.

Former Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae, the most prominent Liberal to survive last night's election, is now hinting at an upcoming 'merger of the left'. That would be political suicide for the Liberals and eliminate their chance of a resurgence in the future. Rae evidently missed the message that the Liberals' loss wasn't because of a splitting of the left vote. The Liberals' catastrophic defeat was a rejection of their shift to the left.

Canadians have traditionally voted for a party of the centre. When the Liberals decided to cease to be that, Canada chose the centrist alternative, which Harper was more than willing to provide. Harper made that explicit in the final days of the election campaign in his appeal to Liberal voters concerned about the possibility of an NDP-led government.

There is always going to be room for a centrist party in Canada to rise. If the Liberals want to commit to being a party of the left, it will help the Conservatives in the short term, and create an opportunity for a new centrist party to emerge to fill the vacuum in the centre that the Liberals have abandoned.

But the Liberals do have an alternative. Layton's NDP now has more than half it's base in Quebec, the province that for most of Canada's history was the cornerstone of Liberal support and success. The NDP is a party of radical socialists, 9-11 conspiracy theorists, and buffoons. They have avoided serious scrutiny for a long time because, as the perennial 3rd or 4th party no one took them too seriously. All that will change with Layton's occupancy of Stornoway. Now the NDP will be subject to intense scrutiny and they will almost certainly collapse under the weight of their own incompetence.

The NDP has done the country a favor by demolishing the Bloc Quebecois, but their ineptitude will eventually lead Quebec to reject them. The next election will be the opportunity for the Liberals to retake a position of prominence in their former base. By rebuilding a centrist party that can appeal to voters in Quebec and outside that province, the Liberals can rebuild itself into a party that can represent Canada from coat to coast.

But the Liberals have to understand what the opportunity is and not squander it. Because if they do, others will emerge to take their place.

Monday, May 2, 2011

In a historic shift, the socialist New Democratic Party's "Community Clinic" Jack Layton is able to become Official Opposition leader by handing Stephen Harper a majority government.

I was not terrible on my election prediction. Went out on a limb to say the Liberals would narrowly hold on to Official Opposition status, and tanked on that (thanks a lot, Gilles Duceppe!) BUT I was right on calling the majority for the Tories.

Now for all my Conservative friends, as happy as I am about the majority win and as much as I advocated for it, it's not good for the country to have a Liberal Party as weak as it currently is; particularly with the NDP as the # 2 party in Parliament.

Hopefully, Liberals will learn their lesson that the stupid, pandering shift to the left is not want Canadians want, and they will return to becoming a sound, centrist party. The Liberals have taken a hit, but they are too well-established and the country needs a centrist party too much for them to be down forever.

In a move I'm sure to regret, I may have to become re-involved in Liberal politics. Pray for me.

Terror group Hamas which controls the Gaza strip today condemned the killing of al Qaida leader and 9-11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden on their website.

I haven't seen a comment yet from Hamas' friends at The Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Islamic Congress. Perhaps they're in mourning.

Nor has there been any comment on this development from the website of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies' spouse, rabble.ca which is a media sponsor of an effort to break Israel's arms embargo of the Hamas government.

I've been challenged by a friend to go on the record, so, always up for a challenge, I will.

And I won't play it safe, I'm going to go out on a limb and present what I think are the 3 most likely outcomes of the election set to being in a few hours.

I think the most probable result is that we will have a slim Conservative majority, with the Liberals, also by a slim margin, holding on to their Official Opposition status.

Despite the NDP polling better than the Liberals, our electoral system has us voting for local candidates instead of direct Executive elections as in the US. Local Liberal candidates are generally much stronger than the many wankers in the NDP. Dipper support is softer than an NDP leader after a happy ending. That's my # 1 scenario.

The next possibility is the Conservatives win the most seats but not enough for a majority. In that case, it's probable that the NDP will be the Official Opposition. This is a tough call, but my guess is that in that event, it becomes an NDP-led minority. It won't last long and Jack Layton will become the socialist Joe Clark. His government will last months at the most and he'll go down to defeat to a Conservative majority within a year.

And the other possibility I'd anticipate is that if the Conservatives get a minority which is only one or two seats short of a majority, a deal will be done with some Blue Whigs to cross the floor, and we'll see a negotiated Tory majority. It wouldn't surprise me if the Tories have sounded out a few right-leaning Liberals for that already.

There it is. Get your crow ready in case I have to eat it in a pie on May 3.

ADDENDUM: I think it's 50/50 whether Ignatieff loses his seat in Etobicoke-Lakeshore to Conservative Bernard Trottier. I think it's 99.9% likely that Iggy won't be leading the Liberals by this time next year.

"It didn't look sketchy to me at all, or else I wouldn't have gone in"

That's what NDP leader Jack Layton had to say about the Velvet Touch rub-and-tug Massage Parlour he paid his now infamous visit to back in 1996.

The "Masturgate" issue for Layton, as far as I'm concerned, is not about whether or not Layton was manually or orally pleasured in a bawdy house 15 years ago. If he was, I don't care. I'd make fun about him for it becoming public fodder, but I do not believe that it should disqualify someone from being Prime Minister of Canada. If every sexual peccadillo were grounds to eliminate someone from the political sphere, we'd be left with a very sorry offering of leaders (maybe that explains the current state of politics in this country).

Layton's handling of the matter, now that it's become news, is the issue. It gives us some insight into how a Prime Minister Layton would deal with a crisis, and that picture isn't nearly as pretty as an Asian erotic masseuse.

What have we learned about Layton from all of this:

1. Collapses under pressure

A smart leader would have said, "I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't commit a crime nor was I ever charged with one. This is just desperation on the part of my opponents, and you can tell how desperate they are. I'm not going to talk about this anymore; I'm sticking to the real issues of the election." and left it at that. He should have refused to say anything more about it. Instead, he panics, and keeps blathering idiotic, unlikely nonsense that makes him look foolish at best and guilty and foolish at worst.

If Layton crumbles like this when dealing with a minor public relations blip, what kind of ineptitude could we expect from him in the face of a real crisis were he to be Prime Minister? The result could be catastrophic.

2 Can't keep his mouth shut

There's a time to talk and a time to shut up.

Though Layton is not a religious man, he would have done well to have listened to the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 18, Verse 28:

"Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise, and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

Invariably, politicians get in trouble for what they do say, not for what they don't say. Layton doesn't have the basic wisdom or understanding of that simple rule, which does not suggest he will make a good leader.

At the time of the incident, Layton was a long-serving downtown Toronto councillor. He claims he didn't see anything sketchy about the Velvet Touch Massage Parlour, which Layton now refers to as a "community clinic" on the second floor of a shady facade of a seedy area in Toronto's Chinatown. According to reports, the place has a coded red light/green light system to indicate when police were coming up the stairs. For his "therapeutic massage" Mr. Layton was found totally nude by police.

Layton's answers raise more questions about his competence and judgement than staying silent would have.

3. Layton is incapable of not making himself look like an idiot over a minor matter

Mr. Layton is a very intelligent individual, who had lived in the downtown core for a long time. If he is telling the truth, Layton is saying that he lacked the savvy that just about every other resident of downtown Toronto has.

What is Layton's spin? That he's the kind of guy who couldn't even get laid in a whorehouse? It's doubtful that would be a particularly encouraging message to voters doubtful about whether he would be a strong Prime Minister.

Frankly, I'd rather have a Prime Minister who isn't stupid and got a hand job than one who is stupid and didn't. In either case, Mr. Layton has babbled himself into a position where he would have us believe he was stupid. That's not how a competent leader does things.

----

One sign of the times is the CBC radio news report I heard this morning. Usually, they try to picture Stephen Harper in the worst possible light, while portraying Layton as a leader. They must have had a whiff of the way the winds are blowing, because this morning the report had Harper sounding Prime Ministerial with a report about how Liberals who want sound economic policies will find the Conservatives the best choice this election. The report about Layton was all about the (alleged) hand job.

If you're a socialist that the CBC has bailed on, you've got to know you're in trouble.

UPDATE: Just in - The Toronto Star shows a poll that says Tories may be headed for a majority. And as will come as a surprise to no one, the NDP has the least committed voters.

I love Molly Johnson, yes I do. Sure, as a singer, but I'm thinking mainly as the host of CBC Radio 2's weekend morning show. She has a soothing voice and her comments sound warm and heartfelt rather than the inane, tiresome prattling by other radio hosts on a certain tax-funded network that takes time away from the music I'd rather be hearing. But I wish Molly (and anyone else who does it) didn't pontificate about how people should go out and vote no matter what.

George Jonas wrote a piece the other day about low-voter turnout being healthy for democracy. He suggested it shows that people are generally happy and high voter turnout is a sign of unease. I don't agree necessarily with his opinion on the desirability of low voter turnout, but on the other hand, it's also nothing to panic about. In a society where every citizen has the right to vote, then people who are interested and informed will generally choose to. The idea that people should go out and vote, no matter what, whether or not they know or care about the issues is facile. Mandatory voting is a position put forward by parties that have policies that appeal most to people who are ill-informed. When people say "you should vote" what they usually really mean is "you should vote the way I want you to vote."

The idea that everyone should vote whether they want to or not also stifles a political statement. There were elections I chose not to exercise my franchise because I didn't want to waste the time of formally picking the least offensive of a bunch of poor choices. Sometimes not voting is a statement that the political parties all need to do better. And I don't want to have to stand in line at a polling station to spoil a ballot. Not voting on election day can be a sign of apathy, but it is also a right and a choice and no one should tell you otherwise.

Molly said "women don't have the right to vote in Saudi Arabia, so make sure you vote for them tomorrow." Well gee, Molly, women don't have the right to drive in Saudi Arabia, so maybe we should drive to the polling station for them. And they aren't allowed to drink there either, so I guess I'll be drinking and driving for them. And they get stoned to death if they commit adultery, so give me a call if you..well..you see where I'm going with all of this.

The point is that we have the right to vote and that the critical cornerstone of democracy. But you are compelled to exercise a right, it's no longer a right, it's a burden.

Yes, everyone should vote. But because you're interested in voting, not because Molly or I or anyone else tells you that you should. And if you don't, that's your right too.